Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci (Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals + Big Rewards!)

Happy HUMP Tuesday! I’ve got myself all confused with dates/times this week – anyone else feel like the week is flying by, even though it’s just begun? No? Just me? HA. I think I’m just losing it! Today I’m heading on a quick lil’ work trip with a fun brand that you’ve seen around these rosy parts – make sure you’re following me on Instagram via my Instastories (@ericaligenza) if you want the behind-the-scenes scoop – literally! We’ll be going behind-the-scenes into a beauty giant’s labs, so it should be a grand time.

Yannno what else is a grand time?

Goal setting tips.

You guys, I get GIDDY for goals.

Give me a goal, I wanna hit it. Give me a blank sheet of paper, I can goal set for ya for the next 5, 10 years. Long term, short term – I’m your goal girl. I spilled a few of the beans in last month’s Cool Sh*t I Lovelovelove since this cute lil’ pink Gucci was a favorite, in terms of how I ended up with it in the first place. And I had asked in this post if y’all would be interested in fleshing out more on my whole hit the goal, get the Gucci personal mantra, with tips on setting big goals + equating to equally big rewards, and it was a resounding YAAAAAS. So, here we are!

My mantra: Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci.

But “Gucci” can be replaced with whatever splurge-worthy, luxurious-to-you item is enough to make you work harder than you’ve been working up to this point to make it happen. 🙂 For me, this came about because I noticed a trend as I sat down at the beginning of every month for shorter term goal setting (ie., for the month ahead). Namely that I wasn’t hitting my goals. HA. Really tho, I noticed that month-after-month the same damn goals were just carrying over in my notebook. I was feeling stuck AF (HA, that rhymes…;) ).

Up to that point, I had zero incentivization system for myself. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Truth be told, I thought I didn’t need it. And I thought it might be a sign of weakness slash incompetence if I needed some sorta carrot dangling in front of me to do the things I’d wanted to do for ages at that point. Couldn’t sheer resolve + will to succeed be enough? Apparently not. HA. So, I sat myself down and altered my goal setting tips, figuring out my top 3 “big” goals. They’re not so huge that they’re impossible, nor are they easy by any means. They’re “stretch” goals – goals that I COULD accomplish realistically, but just might take extra time, extra effort, extra something to make it happen. I also just so happened to have my eyes on 3 specific Gucci bags. (This one – check!, , + this one, in case you’re curious 😉 ).

So, if I could correlate a bag per goal, I figured it would be incentive enough to get my act together and ACTUALLY MAKE IT HAPPEN DANGFLABBIT.

And wouldn’t ya know…literally TWO DAYS after I did this process (2 days!!!), I hit the first goal. And it was a biggie, folks. Ask anyone who knows me well and they’ll likely say that I’m waaaaay too hard on myself in the expectations category.

My only conclusion: it works. Getting super duper specific with what your main goals are – being able to narrow them down! – and getting equally specific with what will happen when you do hit the goal actually works. I think it makes the process that much more tangible, with more of a cause-and-effect feel. And, it makes you feel more of a sense of loss if/when you DON’T hit a goal; instead of nothing happening except for copying/pasting it to the next month’s page, you feel the pang of knowing you have to wait again for that special something that you really really want. You are not allowed to get it under ANY circumstances, lest those circumstances are you actually hitting your goal. It’s the ONLY way to get whatever XYZ thing you’ve assigned to be your highly coveted reward.

Enter, Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci.

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

 

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

Gucci bag // White top (c/o) // Blank ponte pants (as seen styled 3 different ways in this post this week – new favorite find alert! They’re SO DANG COMFY – they’re like leggings that you can wear to work. // Leopard slides (also available here) // Turquoise necklace (old – similar here) // Liquid Lipstick

 

First, THE GOAL.

Set S.M.A.R.T. goals. We talked a bit about it in this post about goal-setting for bloggers, specifically, tho the process for S.M.A.R.T goals is the same process no matter the goal, and it’s KEY for effective goal setting.

  • S – Specific, significant, stretching. The goal should be a specific one, it should be significant in that it legit matters to you, and it should be stretching – something challenging that will take more time + effort than you’ve been giving up to this point.
  • M – Measurable, meaningful, motivational. Measurable is KEY – it needs to be something that you can actually, truly, effectively count/gauge! For example, replace “drink more water” with “drink 8 glasses of water a day: 7 am, 10 am, 12 noon, 2 pm, 4 pm, 6 pm, 8 pm,10 pm.”
  • A – Achievable/attainable, action-oriented.. Obvi, you should be able to actually ACHIEVE your goal. Otherwise…that sucks. Don’t do that to yourself, MK? 😉
  • R – Realistic, relevant, rewarding, results-oriented. Some goals in + of themselves feel hella rewarding to accomplish. BUT…I think it wasn’t working for me because when they’re bigger goals, you might not know how it would feel to accomplish it, because you’ve never done anything like it before. Sure, you might be able to do some research + visualize it a bit…but you still don’t truly KNOW. So it can be harder to get satisfaction *solely* from the idea of that goal being checked off if you don’t have much to sink your teeth into with it. SO, if you have a big reward in mind and you DO know how you feel about the reward, I think that’s just a solid extra credit. 😉
  • T – Time-bound, tangible, trackable. These are key! Attach a timeline to a goal whenever possible. For my Gucci goals, they’re on an “as soon as possible” timeline – and I just know that I can’t get the Gucci UNTIL they’re accomplished. Whether it takes two months or two years, I have to wait until it’s hit. But this can be helpful in keeping you on track (hence, trackable), especially with longer term goals that are broken down into shorter benchmarks. Losing weight, for example – if you want to lose 20 pounds in 2018, it would be totally cray to walk into the gym on January 1st expecting to lose all 20. It just ain’t gonna happen (nor should it – that would be so unhealthy!). So, that’s one to break down – how many pounds by your halfway point in June? How many by quarterly points in March, September, etc? It’s something easily trackable as time goes on, AND all of the smaller, intermediate steps along the way are timebound + trackable, too.

For my own personal process, I have goals goin’ on all the friggin’ time. So for this especially, I wanted to choose the top 3 that would mean the most to me both personally AND professionally. They’re all super specific, measuarable, achievable, relevant, trackable…S.M.A.R.T the whole nine yards.

But when you’re looking for goal setting tips + associating a big goal with a big reward, I think it’s key to hone in on more “life benchmark” kinda goals. These aren’t “get an A on my paper” or “start a new workout routine” kinda goals. These are the longer term doozies that simply CAN’T happen in a jiffy. They take dedicated time + work, they take practice, they take skill developed over time, and they’re constantly a work in progress. No overnight success stories. Important, also, if you’ve got a pricier reward that can’t be PAID for overnight. 😉

These should be the kinda goals that make you a little giddy inside at the thought of achieving it, but also scared AF. But you’re not just scared AF because the goal itself is challenging – you’re scared because you want it that badly. Maybe it’s quitting the job you hate and moving across the country to start a new one that you lovelovelove. Maybe it’s crossing a new, huge financial threshold in your business. Maybe it’s a huge health goal, like going from not being able to run a mile to running in the Boston Marathon.

Some Q’s to help figure out your big goals…

  1. What has been on your goal list for AGES that you’ve still yet to accomplish?
  2. What’s something you want/need to accomplish before your next turning of the decade? 
  3. What are your top 5 values right now?
  4. What is something that you are almost entirely in control of (or CAN be in control of) yourself? (It’s key to not place your success or failure in someone else’s hands! Make sure that reaching your goal weighs mostly – if not entirely – on YOU + YOUR efforts.)
  5. What have you always wanted to do/try, but have been too scared to start?
  6. If you were guaranteed success of one thing that you’ve been scared to start for fear of failure, what would you choose to do?
  7. Do you want it badly enough to do the dirty work to get there, if that means working for months – even years – to make it happen?

If you’re not willing to do the WORK, the goal is too big. Big goals with big rewards need to be meaningful enough to you that the necessary work to make it happen does not phase you. Because the hard truth – the best successes, the biggest goals, + the most bombdotcom accomplishments in life may look like a piece of cake to outsiders, but they’ve often got SO MUCH TIME + SO MUCH WORK backing them up to get to that point.

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

 

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

Gucci bag // White top (c/o) // Blank ponte pants (as seen styled 3 different ways in this post this week – new favorite find alert! They’re SO DANG COMFY – they’re like leggings that you can wear to work. // Leopard slides (also available here) // Turquoise necklace (old – similar here) // Liquid Lipstick

 

Second, THE REWARD.

For me, it’s a Gucci bag. 3 specific Gucci bags, to be exact, each correlated to a specific goal. My 3 goals are ranked from seemingly easiest to hardest, and the bags are associated accordingly based on pricetag – least to biggest splurge.

But of COURSE, you want a reward that’s meaningful in some way to y-o-u. Whether it’s Gucci, YSL, Prada, Louis Vuitton – or whether it has nothing at all to do with designer anything – the only criteria is that it’s something that’s significant to you in some way for some reason, and that you feel good + proud tying to a really big goal. Maybe it’s a trip to the beach, a new workout wardrobe, or a fancy schmancy camera. Whatever it is, it just has to be big enough to be worth it to you – worth the unknown, potentially countless hours to get there + feel good.

Another thing – the reward can’t counteract the goal. For example, for your weightloss goal, a trip to Friendly’s as a reward would NOT be a good idea, since it totally goes against all of that hard work + time that you’ve been putting into being healthier! Make sure that no matter the goal, the reward complements it instead of countering it.

Some Q’s to help figure out your big rewards…

  1. What do you really want, that you probably won’t buy for yourself justbecause?
  2. What would it mean to you to feel like you truly *earned* it somehow?
  3. Why is this specific thing meaningful to you – both the goal, AND the reward?
  4. What’s on your wishlist that’s best giftable from you to YOU?
  5. What will feel even more meaningful the longer it takes to get?

I knew I would probably NEVER buy myself a Gucci bag justbecause. Frankly, I used to think it was just CRAY to spend that much money on a handbag! I knew I’d never be able to justify that kind of splurge for myself unless it was FOR something. If I could tie it to a big goal and had a sense of accomplishment tied to it, I’d feel so much better about the purchase. That’s not to say I don’t still pull bigger treat yo’self moments – I do. But it was knowing that a $1,000+ bag would just feel better in my closet if I could look at it and know what it took to get it there in the first place.

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

Hit the Goal, Get the Gucci - Goal setting tips for Big Goals, Big Rewards - Goal Setting Tips for Big Goals by popular Philadelphia lifestyle blogger Coming Up Roses

 

Do you have any goal setting tips you care to share? What’s a big goal you have that can be tied to a big reward?

I’d lovelovelove to know – let’s talk about it in the comments below! And if you have any Q’s at all on goal setting tips, etc, pleasepleaseplease don’t hesitate to ask – I hope this is helpful to your own process.

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